20,000 people and found that S&Mers "were no more likely to have been coerced into sexual activity” than the general population. But -- also for the record -- an S&Mer whose sexuality was associated with being abused would not be "less legitimate" than the rest of us, as long as that person practiced kink consensually. Because what makes S&M okay is consent, right? Right. S&M isn't okay or not okay because of its "source," whatever that might be -- it's okay only when it's practiced consensually, right? Right. So this is all actually kind ofa silly conversation to have in the first place, right? Right. It's too bad stigma tends to make zero sense, isn't it? Stigma loves to trick you into debating on its own terms.) It's much more entertaining to imagine how people would talk about S&M, if we lived in a culture where S&M wasn't wildly stigmatized. In fact, what if S&M were admired or seen as a great thing... instead of being repressed and forced underground and seen as a dark, evil, disgusting thing? I've known people who called S&M and other fetishes "superpowers," in a kind of ironic twist on this concept. Many people have written about how S&Mers can offer lessons in sexuality that we gleaned from our outside-the-box perspective (there's a whole paper on this topic for clinicians, written by psychologist Peggy Kleinplatz and titled "Learning from Extraordinary Lovers"). I myself have talked about how S&Mers tend to use much more careful and precise sexual communication tactics than the mainstream (examples include checklists and safewords). But these lessons are hardly confined to S&Mers -- there are lots of vanilla people out there who are awesomely careful and precise about communicating sexually. The superpower framework is a bit different... + For example, I already noted that it's been demonstrated that S&Mers are not more likely to have endured non-consensual acts -- so we know that despite what Freud would have had you believe, all S&M does not arise from c